Angel Stations (19 page)

Then followed the memory she most dreaded. They had sent the diggers in, to clear a path through the rubble. For the first time, they saw the blue glow of what lay beyond, and knew that something was still functioning around the curve of the corridor, even after untold aeons. They stayed well back, watching images flicker across screens, the long tangles of cable twisting along the corridor floor like shiny metal snakes.

‘We’ve got no radiation levels evident around there,’ said Fitz, watching the screens with the rest of them.

‘That light . . .’ said Susan, ‘what is it?’

‘Nothing natural, that’s for sure,’ said Fitz. ‘Do you see those markings on the walls? That’s Angel stuff. They look pretty much the same as any other language samples discovered in the past.’

The tell-tale symbol was there on a wall, like the shape made by a child lying on his back in pristine snow and scissoring his arms and legs. A snow angel – the reason they’d become known as the Angels in the first place.

Kim listened hard, imagining what would be said about their discoveries when this went public. There’d be controversy, of course, since they’d broken some rules. But in the long run, that didn’t matter: their names would live forever. Whatever lay around the curve of the corridor would ensure that.

‘So what’s the current danger to us?’ she asked.

‘The remote sensors indicate a sharp drop in air pressure over a distance of two feet a short distance inside the corridor,’ said Fitz.

Kim nodded, feeling light-headed. The Citadel included areas where invisible, undetectable barriers kept some sections in vacuum. With any luck, all they’d have to worry about now was whether they’d be able to breathe. There were other things that might be of concern, of course . . . after all, the Citadel seemed to defy all the known laws of nature.

Past expeditions had run into similar problems, so now pressure suits had become standard issue. She looked at the other two, Odell and Susan. Neither looked like they would object to entering the corridor. Susan’s expression was carefully noncommittal, lacking in any emotion.
Perhaps we could still come out of this as friends
, Kim thought, knowing even as she thought this that it would never be enough. She needed Susan a lot more than Susan needed her. That would be a problem, but she’d deal with it. She promised herself she would.

The first of the fresh tremors came as she stepped, in her pressure suit, towards the now partly cleared corridor. The blue light was strange, because it seemed to come from all places at once. There were no shadows at all, as if the molecules of the air itself were glowing slightly. Amorphous brighter patches billowed gently, almost like smoke, and continued to do so even once they passed through the pressure barrier and entered near-vacuum.

Susan was beside her now, her face only half-visible inside the helmet of her suit. Fitz and Odell had stayed behind to monitor their progress from around the corridor’s far bend. She knew Susan wanted to ‘Observe’ everything, to get it all down for posterity. Kim blanched at the thought of how future Observers would see herself, in this moment, through Susan’s eyes. The thought made her feel awkward, clumsy. She chose her words carefully.

‘We’ll go on past this rubble, keep following the curve. Take some pictures, recordings, stuff like that. See if we can figure out what we’ve got here.’ Susan turned her helmeted head, and Kim caught the hint of a small smile, like Susan had found something ironic in what Kim said. Even to herself, Kim sounded a little stilted, too much playing a role.

‘Fine by me,’ said Susan. Kim was still looking towards her when Susan frowned. ‘Hey, did you feel—?’

Kim did. She had felt it even as Susan spoke, at first mistaking it for some aberration of her own body, then realizing there was something external: a vibration, no, a roar.

I was wrong
, Kim had thought, about what the tremors sounded like before. This is what two mountains sounded like when being ground together.

For one heart-rending moment Kim was sure the whole corridor was about to collapse on top of them. It didn’t, but its walls – the super-strong walls created by an alien race to last an eternity – sagged inwards.
What’s causing this?
wondered Kim. She glanced at Susan who, like her, had frozen, waiting to see what would happen next.

Kim listened. Nothing more. ‘Fitz? Odell? Can you hear me?’

‘Odell here,’ crackled her helmet comm. ‘That was bad. We lost some of our equipment. There’s been some kind of major shift. We’re getting messages down the wire from the guys at the research station. They picked up the shaking too, and want to know if we’ve experienced anything significant.’

Have we experienced anything?
thought Kim. Some joke.

‘Listen,’ said Odell. ‘I’m taking readings here. This whole section of the Citadel, it’s . . . I don’t know, it’s like it’s sagged or something. You need to get out of there.’

‘Maybe it’s settled now,’ said Kim. It had been tens of thousands of years since the last corridor collapse. Why now, just as they were approaching that particular curve in the corridor? More than ever, Kim ached to see what lay around there. Going back and sending in cameras wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to
see
.

‘Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t,’ said another voice over the radio, Fitz this time. ‘Just get out of there.’

‘I’m still in charge of this expedition, Fitz.’

‘Kim, I’m sorry, I’ve already spoken to the Station Command via the outpost relay. They want you to pull back, abort.’

Anger flared through her. He’d gone behind her back. ‘Fitz, you can’t do that. What’s through this corridor will change our lives forever. It’s Angel tech.’

‘Not much use to us if we’re dead,’ came back the reply. ‘Look, I’m sorry. But we’ve already broken too many rules, and the rules are there for a reason.’

There weren’t any words to describe the emotions she felt: an awful kind of betrayal. She turned to Susan.

‘I guess you had something to do with this,’ said Kim. ‘Feel better for it?’

Susan looked back at her with clear, calm eyes. ‘Kim, this is as much news to me as it is to you, believe me.’

But I don’t want to believe
, thought Kim. Her reputation would be destroyed by this, she was sure, and she’d barely even started out. ‘We’re going ahead,’ said Kim.

Susan looked as if she was about to say something, but Kim turned away and started ahead.

‘Fitz, if there’s a real chance of tremors causing some kind of collapse, it’s all the more important we rescue what we can before it gets lost forever. Do you understand?’
Say yes, you little bastard
, she thought.

But the radio merely crackled; then silence. Whatever had affected the cameras was affecting that too.

They moved forward in silence, now unable to communicate except by gesture. Kim turned the corner first, blinking at the haze beyond her helmet. The air seemed to glow more intensely. There were objects visible ahead, machines of some kind. She felt her scalp tingle. Then something moved. Something alive? She tried to peer through the haze. It was like someone had taken the very air and twisted it in a fist, like a piece of cloth bunched between fingers.

The air twisted again, and the ground shuddered. Kim stumbled, slapping one gloved hand against a wall for support. She felt a sudden rush of vertigo, as if
down
was suddenly becoming
up
. There were objects lying nearby, glowing with that same unearthly light. She reached out for one, grabbed it. She looked to Susan, nodded towards them. Take some, she gestured. Kim looked about, grabbing whatever she could of the random junk that seemed to be scattered around them.

Not much time, she thought. Susan was doing the same, picking up whatever she could. They carried it back around the curve of the corridor where they had approached. Ominous tremors rolled through the dust beneath their feet. Kim thought again of the miles of layered rock above them, then tried not to think about that.

When they had got far away enough, Fitz came back online.

‘. . . hell have you been?’

‘It’s the corridor that’s blocking transmission,’ said Kim quickly. She was sweating inside her suit, but only partly because of physical effort.

‘Odell’s on her way,’ said Fitz. ‘She’s fetching one of the tractors.’

‘Thanks, Fitz.’

‘This is under protest, Kim. We’ve already taken too big a chance.’

Kim didn’t reply. Odell appeared a few moments later, the tiny electric tractor whirring down the gentle incline leading to the corridor. ‘Load it all in,’ Kim heard her say over the intercom. ‘Is there more?’

‘Lots more,’ said Kim. Odell was close enough for her to see the uncertainty in the geologist’s face. Kim was scared, but they had to get it all out. ‘Fitz is right,’ said Odell. ‘It’s too dangerous. I’d rather be alive and poor than rich and dead.’

‘Just take this stuff up to Fitz. We’re going back for more.’ Susan said nothing, just watching, ‘Observing’.

They tramped back into the corridor and out of communications range again. This time they found something that looked roughly like a lathe. It also looked big, heavy, but when they tried to move it, it turned out to be as light as a feather. They took either end of it, and by the time they shifted it out of the corridor, Odell was back; her mouth now set in a hard thin line. Two strong tremors rolled consecutively through the ground beneath them.

Susan kept twisting her head around, trying to record everything she saw. Her memories alone could be worth a fortune by the time they got out of there. They loaded the lathe-thing onto the tractor. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ insisted Odell, her voice shaky as the ground shifted again beneath their feet.

‘Just one more trip,’ said Kim.

‘She’s right,’ said Susan. ‘It’s time to go.’

‘Only one more trip, I swear. It’ll take just a minute or two. I’m not being crazy here, I’m being realistic. We could find something that jumps science forward a century or more. These corridors aren’t going to collapse a second time just because
we
turned up.’

‘Kim, look around you,’ Susan almost shouted over the intercom. ‘The place is falling down around our ears. We have got to get out of here.’

Kim turned away, moving as fast as she could in her heavy suit.

‘Kim,’ Susan called after her. ‘Kim.’ Then her voice crackled out of range as Kim entered the glowing corridor.
One more trip. Bring back just one thing more
. Maybe the secret of living forever. Maybe something like the Observer bioware, yet even more amazing. One more thing.

She found something, started to carry it back out. And saw to her surprise, as she turned, that Susan had followed her in. She caught a glimpse of Susan’s face: the mask of passivity had slipped, and Kim felt curiously relieved to see the anger there. She realized it was something she’d been trying to achieve, to break through that mask of calmness. They both carried out whatever they could in silence.

‘Okay, that’s it,’ said Kim. ‘Let’s get out of here. I—’

The world caved in. Kim watched in horror as the end of the corridor nearest to the scattered artefacts first sagged, then collapsed, the ceiling rushing down to meet the ground.

‘Go now!’ said Kim, and they jumped on board the tractor, Odell already pulling away up the long ramp towards where Fitz was stationed. A rumbling surged up through the wheels, through their pressure suits, almost rattling the brains in their skulls.

Fitz had the other tractor’s engine already running when they found him. ‘Forget the stuff, forget everything,’ he said. ‘Just come on.’ Behind him, a screen strobed through the empty darkness: an icon flashing emergency red.

Kim glanced at the first load of artefacts Odell had fetched up from the corridor. She moved towards them, picked one up.

‘Kim, we have to get out of here
now
,’ said Fitz, his voice sounding high and cracked.

‘No, wait. We can’t leave all of this behind.’ She looked warily at the great stone slabs that surrounded her, their surfaces rough with carved symbols and alien scriptures. ‘We can load up both tractors.’

She turned, looking at Susan, and remembered . . . remembered she wasn’t really here. And then the foreknowledge came to her, of what was about to happen. Kim glanced up, saw the high ceiling fragmenting, then falling towards them, and time seemed to slow down to a crawl, so that she witnessed it all, as the great slabs of stone crashed down upon Odell and Susan. Research equipment spat sparks and died under that crushing weight . . . and they fell into darkness. She felt a hand grab her and yank her away.

‘Kim! Give me a hand!’ It was Fitz. The collapsing stonework had crushed both Odell and Susan and one of the tractors beneath it. The lights had shorted out, leaving them in total darkness.

Kim remembered she had a flashlight strapped to her thigh, and she pulled it out, switched it on. What she saw wasn’t pleasant. Odell had been horribly crushed under a great boulder. Blood pooled around what little she could see of her. Susan lay under some smaller rocks, but the faceplate of her helmet was shattered, her open eyes staring out. Kim stepped forward, too numb to feel real horror yet. Fitz began shoving a rock from on top of Susan.

Kim moved forward to help him.
It’s too late
, she thought, looking at the shattered faceplate. Susan’s dead eyes stared back at her, accusing. She busily helped, nevertheless. Medical technology could do wonders – you never knew. She kept that thought in her mind as she helped Fitz pull Susan free.

Fitz ran back to the surviving tractor, and pulled out a survival cocoon. This was a long tube of flexible plastic, which could also monitor vital signs.
But will it keep her warm?
Kim wondered. She didn’t know. She helped strip the pressure suit from Susan, doing whatever she could.

We’re putting a corpse in this thing
, she thought, manoeuvring Susan’s body into the bag. It was like handling a sack of loose rocks. The ground trembled again. They then loaded Susan and whatever else they could strap onto the tractor, and shot back up the long ramp to the next highest level, aiming for the exit.